32.897, Review: Spanish; Phonetics; Sociolinguistics: Chappell (2019)

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Subject: 32.897, Review: Spanish; Phonetics; Sociolinguistics: Chappell (2019)

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Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2021 19:56:45
From: Andrea Canavosio [andrea.canavosio at unc.edu.ar]
Subject: Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-88.html

EDITOR: Whitney  Chappell
TITLE: Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception
SERIES TITLE: Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 21
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Andrea de los Angeles Canavosio, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

SUMMARY

The edited volume presents Spanish sociophonetic perception research studies
from three geographical areas of the Spanish world: Spain, South America and
North America. The volume includes a final section with two chapters devoted
to future research directions in the field of sociophonetic perception
studies.

The book begins with an introduction by the editor, who refers to the
motivations that prompted this project. Most studies in the field of Spanish
sociophonetics have focused mainly on production, and on finding out or
describing how linguistic variables correlate with social groups.  However, in
these production studies many questions about the reasons why speakers employ
certain phonetic variants remain unanswered. By producing one specific
feature, are speakers trying to reassert their indigenous identity or is it
used just due to linguistic transfer? Why do different speech communities,
such as women, working class people, or youngsters tend to favor certain
variants over others? Most importantly, which are the social meanings that
phonetic variants have in different contexts? For example, hiperarticulating
the release of the /t/ sound, may be associated with different groups of
people, such as gay men (Podesva, 2006), nerd girls (Bucholtz, 2001), or
Orthodox Jewish boys (Benor, 2001). The use of this single phonetic variant
may also index a range of permanent qualities, such as intelligence or
elegance, for instance, and also certain stances, such as politeness or
exasperation. 

Sociophonetic perception studies in the last two decades have focused mainly
on English variants and they show that listeners are able to perceive
sociophonetic cues even though they may not be aware of having this ability.
There is evidence showing the correlation between different English varieties
or certain accents and access to housing (Purnell et al., 1999), education
(Chin, 2010), and work (Cargile, 2000; Grossman, 2011), among others. Chappell
highlights that linguistic information is not perceived in a vacuum, as it is
interpreted in the light of other contextual and social information listeners
may have about speakers, such as gender and regional backgrounds. The editor
points out that there is a scarcity of research in Spanish sociophonetic
perception studies, even though in the past decade there have been some
interesting research work that shows evidence that lack of exposure to
variation has a negative impact on perceptual accuracy (Schmidt, 2013), for
example, or that language dominance affects the way variants are perceived
(Ramírez & Simonet, 2017).  Additionally, results have revealed how a variant
such as [u] and [es] is perceived as being more rural in Asturian Spanish.
Other examples have to do with the articulation of consonants, especially of
the phoneme /s/, which shows great sociophonetic variation. Its retention,
aspiration, elision or hyperarticulation may be associated with a certain
status, a certain gender, a certain personality, or a certain age. 

The first section of the volume is devoted to the region of Spain. Chapter 1,
“The role of social cues in the perception of final vowel contrasts in
Asturian Spanish”, by Sonia Barnes (Marquette University), explores how social
information about the speakers influences listeners’ perception of different
realizations –ranging from Spanish [o] to Asturian [u] - of the masculine
singular morpheme in the city of Gijón, in the Northwestern region of
Asturias, where there is a situation of language contact between Asturian and
Spanish. The study intends to show how existing language attitudes and social
expectations listeners have about speakers may condition the processing of
linguistic variation, the perception of explicitly stigmatized phonetic
variants in this case, finding more evidence to claim that the relationship
between linguistic and social information is bidirectional. A short
questionnaire and a binary, forced-choice identification task were used in the
experiment; the survey was administered online through Qualtrics. All
participants were exposed to the same auditory stimuli, but the visual
information varied for each of the three groups. The first group viewed a
photograph of a man in an urban setting; the second one viewed a man in a
rural setting; and the third group did not view any image. The random forest
and the logistic regression model results show that social information about
the speaker affected vowel categorization significantly, especially in cases
where there was ambiguity in the linguistic signal. Respondents who claimed to
be in favor of Asturian being given co-official status showed increased
sensitivity to social priming. These results provide further evidence to
support exemplar theory and models that incorporate exemplar weighting. 

Chapter 2, titled “Covert and overt attitudes towards Catalonian Spanish
laterals and intervocalic fricatives” was written by Justin Davidson
(University of California, Berkeley). This study explores implicit and
explicit attitudes of Catalan-Spanish Barcelonan bilinguals and of monolingual
Spanish speakers towards two phonetic variables of Catalonian Spanish: the
velarization of clear [l] to dark [ɫ], and the voicing of intervocalic
voiceless /s/ to [z]. Covert social evaluations towards these phonetic
realizations were gathered through an expanded form of the Matched Guise
Technique, addressing variables individually. The guise stimuli were carefully
created to be read aloud by a trained bilingual phonetician. The samples were
then digitally manipulated using Praat (Boersman & Weenink, 2018) to include
the tokens needed in each recording. Listeners completed two rounds of
match-guise questionnaires, a socio-demographic questionnaire and a 10-minute
interview. Results show that the two Catalonian variants were evaluated
independently and uniquely by the bilingual and the monolingual participants
on five attitudinal categories--solidarity, power, accent, rurality and
bilingualism--simultaneously showing both positive and negative evaluations of
Catalonian Spanish as a whole.                                                
                                                                              
               

Chapter 3, “Dialectology meets sociophonetics: The social evaluation of ceceo
and distinción in Lepe, Spain”, by Brendan Regan (Texas Tech University), is
the last chapter in the section devoted to studies about varieties in Spain.
The study’s objectives are to identify social evaluations listeners make of
two possible coronal fricative realizations –ceceo and distinción- in the
community of Lepe, located in the province of Huelva, Andalucía; to analyze
how these evaluations may vary depending on listener and speaker
characteristics; and to examine if language attitudes are influenced by time
away from the community. A matched-guise experiment was administered online
among 101 speakers from Lepe, using the survey program Qualtrics. The stimuli
consisted of twelve speakers’ spontaneous speech samples which were digitally
manipulated. Statistical analysis indicates that speakers who produced
distinción rated higher in socioeconomic status, education level, urban-ness,
formality and occupational prestige than speakers who produced ceceo. When
compared with listeners who have not lived away from Lepe, informants who have
lived more years away from the community evaluated speakers who produced
distinción higher and speakers who produced ceceo lower. Age and gender of
listeners also influenced evaluation. The study shows that even small
communities can experience changes in language attitudes, and it also
highlights how these language attitudes may have an influence on dialect
convergence toward national standards at the cost of regional ones. 

The second section of this volume is devoted to studies of South American
varieties. Chapter 4 is titled “Regional identity in Highland Ecuador” and was
written by Christina García (Saint Louis University). This study focuses on
the interface between sociolinguistic perception and perceptual dialectology
by comparing attitudes of 219 Ecuadorians from four different cities towards
intervocalic /s/ voicing. The experiment was built and administered using
Qualtrics. The stimuli used for the matched-guise experiment was taken from
sociolinguistic interviews made to four speakers from Loja and some of the
samples were digitally manipulated to suit the research objectives. The
findings show that the use of intervocalic [z] is a Highlands regional marker,
and it is associated with younger speakers, less pleasant-sounding speech, and
lower status, but only for female speakers. No significant differences were
found in the ratings of the male speakers, as the use of intervocalic [z] is
expected and does not carry social meaning among males, whereas females’ use
of the variant is marked and it is associated with certain social information.
Surprisingly, listener origin did not have an effect on listeners’ perception
of the two variants either. 

Chapter 5, titled “Spanish and Palenquero: Language identification through
phonological correspondences”, was written by John M. Lipski (The Pennsylvania
State University). It examines the bilingual environment in the village of San
Basilio de Palenque, where Spanish and the creole Palenquero co-exist. These
languages are generally mutually unintelligible, mostly because of their
disjoint grammars, but there is considerable overlap between them, especially
in cognate lexicons. The study aims at finding out to what extent being aware
of these correspondences may contribute to rapid language identification in
Palenquero - Spanish speakers.  Three experiments were used to collect the
data: a language identification task of single words, an on-line rapid
language identification task through eye movement and an on-line processing
task of identification of language switches through eye movement. The findings
indicate that language identification is slightly facilitated when cognates
exhibit regular phonological correspondences, illustrating how sociophonetic
variation may have a reinforcing role in language processing. Results are
relevant to the language revitalization process that Palenquero is undergoing
and to research on revitalization efforts of other minority languages which
are considerably cognate with the dominant language. 

Chapter 6, by Lauren B. Schmidt (San Diego State University), is titled “The
role of social networks in cross-dialectal variation in the perception of the
Rioplatense assibilated pre-palatal [ʃ]”. The study’s objective is to explore
the way the degree of dialectal contact, either through social networks or
other forms of exposure such as media, influences the perception of [ʃ]
–sheísmo-, a non-native regional Spanish sociophonetic variant which is
frequent in some Argentinian varieties, among yeísta listeners. The
participants were two groups of listeners who belong to yeísta speech
communities, one from La Rioja, Northwestern Argentina, and the other from
Bogotá, central Colombia. The informants completed an identification task
where they categorized pseudowords’ consonants into either weak palatal
fricative [j] or voiceless assibilated pre-palatal [ʃ]. They also responded to
a language background and dialect contact questionnaire. The results reveal
that both groups assigned the variant  [j] to the intended phonetic category,
mirroring their own regional production norms. However, when asked to
categorize the non-local variant [ʃ], identification varied depending on how
much contact with Rioplatense speakers participants had had in the past.
Findings reveal that experience may modify listeners’ perceptual and
processing norms without their necessarily adopting the use of the specific
sociophonetic variant.

Chapter 7 is titled “The social perception of intervocalic /k/ voicing in
Chilean Spanish” and its authors are Mariška A. Bolyanatz Brown and Brandon M.
A. Rogers (Occidental College / Ball State University). This research study
aims at determining whether the novel allophonic trend of producing /k/
voicing in utterance-medial intervocalic position among young Chilean women is
identified by listeners, and if listeners’ perception of this feature matches
findings in production. A pseudo matched-guise experiment conducted online
through Qualtrics was used for data collection. The stimuli were extracted
from sociolinguistic interviews made to four male and female speakers from
Santiago de Chile; it consisted of two to three-word utterances containing
intervocalic /k/, which were then digitally manipulated to include a voiced
and a voiceless guise. Participants had to be native speakers of Chilean
Spanish and reside in Chile. Results show that the voicing of intervocalic /k/
may function as a marker of local identity. Male speakers were perceived as
more Chilean if they used the voiced variant. However, even though young
female speakers showed a higher tendency to use the voiced /k/, the feature
was not associated with any social information by listeners. The fact that
this allophonic variant is in the process of emerging and has low perceptual
salience may account for the mismatch between production and perception
findings. 

Chapter 8, “The sociophonetic perception of heritage Spanish speakers in the
United States: Reactions to labiodentalized <v> in the speech of late
immigrants and U.S.-born voices” was written by Whitney Chappell. The study
aims at finding out the degree of heritage speakers’ awareness of
sociolinguistic information present in phonetic variants and the social
properties they associate with the labiodental and the bilabial realizations
of <v> through a matched-guise experiment. The stimuli contained sixteen
digitally manipulated recordings of two groups of Spanish speakers: late
Mexican immigrants and heritage speakers. A survey which gathered the
seventy-five listeners’ demographic information and experience with the
Spanish language was also administered. The results of the experiment reveal
that variant (labiodental vs. bilabial) was a predictor of heritage listeners’
social evaluations at three different dimensions, confirming that listeners
were able to, and did, perceive phonetic variants as socially meaningful
markers. However, interpretation of variants was not static; it varied
depending on the sex of the speaker, and it seemed to be associated with
prestige and status when speakers were female. Even though the production of
heritage speakers is many times different from that of Mexican monolingual
Spanish speakers, their perceptions coincide, which gives evidence of heritage
speakers’ rich sociophonetic knowledge.  

Chapter 9 is titled “Spoken word recognition and shesheo in Northwestern
Mexico: A preliminary investigation into the effects of sociophonetic
variability on auditory lexical access”, by Mariela López Velarde and Miquel
Simonet (University of Arizona). When considering the phonetic variants of
(ch) in norteño Mexican Spanish, speakers are usually exposed to free
variation between [tʃ] and [ʃ]. The study aims at exploring auditory lexical
processing patterns of these two phonetic variants among speakers of this
Spanish variety. The participants were 48 people who were born in Hermosillo,
Sonora, Mexico, and who were living there when the study was carried out. The
data was collected using a lexical decision task with immediate auditory
priming to find out whether the variants are considered identical or similar
by measuring recognition time. The stimuli was made up of 24 target words
which always contained the consonant (ch)  in word-initial position, and which
were produced with variants [tʃ] and [ʃ]. They were preceded by related and
unrelated primes. Results show that long-time Hermosillo residents are equally
likely to accept or recognize both word-initial variants of (ch) when
identifying possible Spanish words. The difference between matching and
mismatching priming conditions was not significant. However, the informants’
response latencies were faster for [tʃ] than for [ʃ], suggesting than the
former variant may be privileged in phonological representations that contain
(ch), probably due to its frequency or social salience. 

Chapter 10 is the last one of the sections about North American Spanish. It
was written by Natalia Mazzaro and Raquel González de Anda (University of
Texas at El Paso) and it is titled “The perception-production connection: /
tʃ/ deaffrication and rhotic assibilation in Chihuahua Spanish”. The research
study investigates the production and perception of / tʃ/ deaffrication and
rhotic assibilation in speakers of Chihuahua Spanish so as to find out whether
social salience, frequency and phonological context may have an impact on the
relationship between perception and production. The 35 participants were
native Spanish speakers recruited in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad de Juárez,
México. They were asked to narrate the story Little Red Riding Hood and to
talk about their favorite food to elicit production data. The perception
experiment consisted in completing a discrimination task based on oral stimuli
that was composed of speech samples produced by a female Spanish speaker from
Chihuahua. The findings reveal that on the production side, assibilation was
more frequent among the youngest generation and also slightly more common
among women. Higher rates of deaffrication were found in the youngest group
and in men. As regards perception, assibilation was successfully perceived by
very few participants. In contrast, almost all participants perceived
deaffrication, which revealed greater sociolinguistic awareness and a closer
production-perception relationship for this variant. The authors state that
the relationship between perception and production is strongly influenced by
the phonological context of the variable, its frequency, and its salience in
the speech community. 

The fourth and last section in the volume contains two chapters which are
devoted to future directions in the field of sociophonetic perception
research. Chapter 11 was written by Sara Mack (University of Minnesota-Twin
Cities) and its title is “Of intersectionality, replicability, and holistic
perspectives”. The author highlights the interdisciplinary nature of
sociophonetics. She states that sociophonetic production studies are much more
widespread, whereas research in the perception arena has just started to
expand. She puts forward some practical and theoretical considerations to make
a contribution to this expanding field. The concepts that she focuses on are
intersectional approaches and reproductibility, as they are considered
essential to advance in this area. Intersectional approaches help in the
analysis of language use and social identity, as they provide the necessary
theoretical framework to understand complex and dynamic social relationships
which influence and at the same time are influenced by the social, historical
and interactional contexts. Variables need to be seen as working together,
co-creating and adapting to each other to constitute social meaning (Levon,
2015). As regards reproductibility, the author claims that Spanish
sociophonetic perception studies need to aim at their results being
reproducible if they want this field to move forward. Overcoming the
replication crisis that many theories in the social sciences have undergone
would mean a step forward in legitimizing the discipline. 

Chapter 12, the last one in the volume, is titled “Future directions for
sociophonetic research in Spanish” and was written by Nicholas Hendriksen
(University of Michigan). It takes the form of an epilogue which provides an
overview of the 11 chapters presented in the volume, the subtopics and themes
developed, methodologies and theoretical approaches used, and points in common
between the research studies. In the second section of the chapter, the author
refers to possible future research empirical directions, especially focusing
on variables which could be of interest: vocalic variation and prosodic
(mainly intonational) variation, as he claims there is still much room for
research in these areas, not only in bilingual or multilingual settings but
also in monolingual ones. The need to further study the link between
production and perception by integrating methodologies and techniques is
stressed, as it is vital to have a thorough understanding of how individual
listeners and speakers take part in sound change phenomena. The author also
makes reference to the exploration of non-linguistic factors that mediate the
relationship between production and perception as a promising field to delve
into in order to have insights on language variation and change. 

EVALUATION

This volume is a must for all graduate and undergraduate linguistic students
and scholars interested in having a comprehensive view of variation in the
Spanish-speaking world, as it gives you an insight into what is being done in
the area of Spanish sociophonetic perception nowadays and how much is yet to
be explored within this fascinating field. There are no books devoted
exclusively to perception studies in the Spanish language, as most research
studies have focused their attention mainly on the production side of Spanish
sociophonetics. The volume provides state of the art studies carried out by
renowned researchers from different countries. They analyze the phenomena from
different perspectives, showing theoretical advancements in the field and
helping us understand how synchronic social evaluations may lead to diachronic
language change. Including the three main geographical areas of the Spanish
world and devoting one section to each of them is a plus of the volume, as it
aims at including as many varieties and regions as possible. However, there is
still much to be observed and studied about the large number of Spanishes that
can be heard in South America, for instance. South American varieties show as
much or possibly even more research potential than varieties from the other
regions, as many of them are in contact with aboriginal languages. The final
section of the volume gives further coherence and closure to the book,
pointing out how the studies included relate to each other and suggesting
methodologies and paths for future research. I consider there is still much
research to be done also on the interface between Spanish sociophonetic
perception-production studies and second language acquisition. As it was
clearly stated by the editor, the volume is intended as a stepping stone and
as an invitation for researchers to keep on exploring the plethora of ways in
which we can analyze Spanish sociophonetic variation, which is still literally
a world of possibilities.

REFERENCES 

Benor, S. (2001). The learned /t/: Phonological variation in Orthodox Jewish
English. In T. Sanchez & D. E. Johnson (Eds.), Penn Working Papers in
Linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 2000 (pp. 1/16). Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics. 

Bucholtz, M. (2001). The whiteness of nerds: Superstandard English and racial
markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11, 84-100.
https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.84

Cargile, A. C. (2000). Evaluations of employment suitability: Does accent
always matter? Journal of Employment Counseling 37, 

Chin, W. Y. (2010). Linguistic profiling in education: How accent bias denies
equal educational opportunity to students of color. Scholar 12, 355-443. 

Grossman, L. A. (2011). The effects of mere exposure on responses to
foreign-accent speech (Unpublished MA thesis). San José State University. 

Levon, E. (2015). Integrating Intersectionality in Language, Gender, and
Sexuality Research. Language and Linguistics Compass 9(7), 295-308.

Podesva, R. (2006). Phonetic detail in sociolinguistic variation: Its
linguistic significance and role in the construction of social meaning
(Unpublished PhD dissertation). Stanford University. 

Purnell, T., Idsardi, W., & Baugh, J. (1999). Perceptual and phonetic
experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language
and Social Psychology 18, 10-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X99018001002

Ramirez, M., & Simonet, M. (2017). Language dominance and the perception of
the Majorcan Catalan //-// contrast: Asymmetrical phonological
representations. International Journal of Bilingualism, 1-15.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006916688334 

Schmidt, L. B. (2013). Regional variation in the perception of sociophonetic
variants of Spanish /s/. In A. M. Carvalho & S. Beaudrie (Eds.), Selected
proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (pp. 189-202).
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

My name is Andrea Canavosio. I work as an English Language and Phonetics and
Phonology lecturer at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. I have an
MA in English Applied Linguistics. I am currently doing a PhD in Linguistics
at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK. My research interests revolve
around Spanish and English phonetics and phonology, sociophonetics, assessment
of oral proficiency, and second language acquisition. I have also done
research on second language writing and assessment.





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